Lessons from Twenty-Five Years of Preaching God’s Word
At just 14 years old, I stood before Hardin Baptist Church in my hometown in Kentucky on a Sunday night and preached my first sermon. This year marks twenty-five years since that event—twenty-five years of a life of preaching. To say the least, I hope I’m a better preacher today than I was twenty-five years […]
Who Were the Danbury Baptists?
The Baptist story is integral to the history of the United States. Thomas Jefferson’s Letter to a committee of the Danbury Baptist Association is well known for the clause “a wall of separation between Church & State.”[1] Who were the Danbury Baptists? Who were the committee members? Why would an American President send a letter […]
A Baptist Faith-Healing?
What is a Baptist understanding of miracles in the church? While Calvinistic Baptists have been associated with cessationism—the belief that the miraculous events such as those found in the book of Acts ceased after the first century—the tradition’s past holds a few surprises. Baptists emerged as a distinct group in the early seventeenth-century, a tumultuous […]
Dawson Trotman: The Navigators and the Discipleship Movement – An Excerpt
In 1955, Trotman spoke to the staff of Back to the Bible. This speech was eventually titled “Born to Reproduce.” In this forty-seven-minute message, he articulated a multiplication process that was a passion of his heart. “[Another] contribution [of Trotman] is rediscovery of the multiplication principle. This, too, Dawson demonstrated in his own ministry, boldly […]
Faculty Dialogues: Baptist Ecclesiology
Live at the 2022 Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting in Anaheim, California, I hosted another episode of Faculty Dialogues with my friend and colleague, Dr. Chris Chun. We discussed the theological foundations of core Baptist doctrines like credobaptism, congregationalism and church autonomy as well as misconceptions and myths of the Baptist tradition. Watch the full […]
Value of Being a Southern Baptist
More than 25 years as a Southern Baptist denominational executive, preceded by more than a dozen years as a Southern Baptist pastor, has shaped my perspective on navigating the vagaries of working among and with the large network known as the Southern Baptist denomination. It can be a daunting and at times disappointing task. Here […]